The present disclosure relates to a method for managing memory, and more specifically, a method for prioritizing regions of memory to optimize garbage collection performance.
It is often beneficial to determine whether there are any objects within a given memory region that are being accessed, and, if so, to obtain an estimate of their frequency of access. For example, performance may be improved if frequently-accessed objects in a memory region are consolidated or moved to a higher-speed memory region. Additionally, when defragmenting a large region of memory containing objects of various sizes with unused spaces between objects, it is often beneficial to determine if there are any objects within a given memory region that are being accessed and, if so, to obtain an estimate of their access rate. This information enables the defragmentation routine to prioritize defragmentation of memory regions that contain objects that are being used most frequently before those used less frequently.
Java virtual machines (JVM) and other runtime environments are a type of memory-managed applications that may occasionally perform a garbage collection operation on the area of memory used by the application. During a garbage collection operation, all other operations of the JVM typically cease, which significantly increases the response time of any transactions. This delay may cause problems for client devices accessing Java virtual machine.